Author's Note: OK, this is different than my usual. It's short and angsty and a one-shot, and if you're waiting for me to update Twelve well, I apologize for that. I'll get on it soon, I promise. This is just...well, I needed to get these darker thoughts out of my head, I guess. It took awhile, and my apologies if it doesn't make sense. Standard disclaimers apply, and PLEASE REVIEW even if it's to tell me to stick with fluffy, harmless humor and romance. :)
They're called scars because you're stuck with them forever. Movies and books and eternally optimistic people always talk about healing scars through love in time…but they never do. The best you can hope for is that they fade away until they're barely noticeable. Until you don't see them every time you look in the mirror, unless you're specifically looking for them. The harsh lines can become pale silvery webs, invisible to most…but they're still there. They'll always be there.
He watches her sleep and thinks about Nina.
He knows he shouldn't. It's not fair to her, and it's not helping him any, either. But he can't help but compare them whenever she's like this, peacefully unconscious in his arms, her hair spread across his pillow like she belongs there (she does). He tries not to, but in spite of his best efforts he finds himself comparing them. Nina was all hard, independent challenge. She is even more independent, and in some ways more of a challenge, but where Nina kept him out she welcomes him with open arms.
Nina never cared that people at work knew about them, but she does. He smiles to himself as he thinks about how backwards that is…you'd think he would want his woman willing to shout to the skies that she's his, but he appreciates her circumspection. He wants everyone to know, sure, but he's enjoying having a secret with her almost as much. She's not a great liar when she hasn't had time to think up a story, so he gets a private chuckle whenever one of the other men at work asks her out and she stammers some excuse or other. Once the poor fellow slumps off, she always turns to where he's watching her and narrows her eyes or, if no one's around, sticks her tongue out at him. Then he grins, and sometimes he hauls her off to a holding room to kiss her senseless and remind her just why she turned down the other guy.
The more he contemplates it the more he realizes: he wants to keep her to himself for awhile. If no one knows, fewer things can go wrong. He examines that thought a bit and can't figure out exactly how it works out logically, but somehow he knows it's right. As long as it's just them, just their passion outside work, they're not risking as much.
He feels a pang of guilt. He should be willing to risk it all for her; he knows he loves her that much. But he keeps remembering Nina, he can't help it. It's like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop, though he knows rationally and emotionally that it's never going to. Nina is a scar on his heart.
She knows he's watching her, but because she's so comfortable, curled into his chest, she pretends to be asleep. Breathing slowly, she takes a minute to appreciate the subtleties of their relationship: how safe she feels, how she doesn't need to pull the blankets up to her nose like she usually does because he gives off enough body heat for both of them, the way he smells like soap and a hint of cologne and him. He softly moves his fingertips up and down her spine and she tries not to shiver, not to let her breathing quicken. She doesn't want him to stop watching her, because it's time like this she knows he needs.
She knows he's thinking about Nina.
She isn't sure how she knows it, she just does. She said it out loud once, how good she was getting at reading his face, and since then they've become so much more intimate that she's practically telepathic where he's concerned. So she knows he's comparing her to the last woman in his life, and she doesn't mind because he keeps stroking her back and now and then up to the back of her neck, where he knows she's sensitive.
She doesn't mind him thinking about Nina for the same reason she doesn't want anyone at work to know about them yet: he needs time. Time to learn to trust her, because his capacity for trust was damaged so much by that bitch's betrayal—damaged, but not ruined. He thinks she doesn't want to tell because she's afraid of losing her job, or of being embarrassed at work, but she's really doing it for him. He needs time. And every time he does this, every time he compares them in his mind, she can tell he's thinking more about her and less about Nina, and one of these days he'll only be thinking of her, and then she'll tell him.
She'll roll over and look him in the eye. "Sorry," he'll say with a grin as he'll lean down to kiss her, "I didn't mean to wake you up."
"Yes, you did," she'll giggle as he starts peppering kisses down her neck. He'll admit, slowly, teasingly as he arouses her body, that yes, in fact, he did mean to wake her up. They'll stop talking and they'll make love, slowly, drawing out the pleasure until finally they both come, so intensely that they'll wonder why they ever wasted their time with anyone else. And as they lie there in the afterglow, as he tangles his fingers in her hair and tells her how special she is and calls her 'sweetheart' she'll smile and touch his cheek and tell him she loves him.
It actually happens one night, stormy, only a week or so later. After a particularly harrowing day at work, he's at a bar, with Jack, trying to relax enough to go home and sleep. Jack's trying to get drunk enough not to have nightmares about the teenager who died in his arms earlier, the one he couldn't save.
It's not a social kind of bar. It's a dirty, badly-lit place in a worse neighborhood, full of the kind of guys you don't flash your badge at. They take a grimy table in the back corner, their backs to the wall. He drinks just enough beer to take the edge off, but Jack starts in on whiskey, shot after shot. For almost an hour they sit in silence, lost in their own thoughts, but finally Jack hits the magic number and gets talkative.
"Ever think about Nina?" Jack asks gruffly, staring into the bottle like it's going to give him answers.
"Whadda you think?" He answers carefully, peering up at Jack from a bowed head.
A bark of laughter. Jack takes another drink. "No one talks about her anymore. Especially to me. It's like they think if they don't say her name, we can all pretend she never existed. Like it never happened. Even Kate…" he takes a deep breath. "Even Kate's never asked about her."
"You think it'd help?"
"Hell, no. It's just…don't you ever get the feeling that people have all these misconceptions? Don't you ever just want someone to know your version, not one that was in the official brief?"
"No," he starts to answer, but Jack rambles on without paying attention.
"You're lucky. You never loved her. I did. Not the way I loved Teri, but it was love. I wish to God it wasn't, but it was." Another drink. Then another. "You know what love is? It's handing her the knife and unbuttoning your shirt and praying like shit that she loves you back, because if she's not a Teri, if she's a Nina, she just gonna plunge that knife into your heart and start hacking away."
Not long after that he's helping his friend into the taxi, still babbling drunkenly. Jack pauses before shutting the door, looking up but not seeing the man in front of him, seeing someone else. "I'm just scared to death that she didn't believe me. The last time I told her I loved her…I have nightmares that she died thinking I loved Nina more than her." He shuts the door and the cab drives off.
He's not too drunk to drive, but he's in the mood to walk, so he parks on the far side of the park near her apartment and takes the long way through. He realizes, distantly, that he's just begging for trouble, walking through LA in the middle of the night, but she lives in a good neighborhood and he makes it to her door without incident. A part of him is disappointed—a fight would have burned off some of the nervous energy that has started to race through his system. The walk didn't help; he feels just as restless and unsettled now as he did watching Jack leave in the taxi.
Was Jack right, he wonders, taking the steps to her second-floor home two at a time. Did I never really love Nina? He takes out his key, the one she had cut for him ten days ago and presented to him with a bright yellow ribbon tied around it. The ribbon's still there, the only personal note to the otherwise utilitarian key ring: no souvenir tags from touristy places, no smart-ass slogans emblazoned on steel, just a curly little sunbeam dangling next to the key to her apartment. Every time he takes his keys out he thinks to himself, I should cut that off. Every time, he twists the bit of ribbon around his ring finger and wonders...just wonders.
Opening and shutting the door as quietly as he can, he kicks off his shoes and pads into the living room. She's lying right where he knew she'd be: on the couch, afghan pulled up to her waist, open book face down on her chest. The lamp behind her is still on, and a mug of now-tepid hot chocolate rests on the end table. She waited up for him. Frowning, he pulls out his cell phone: no missed calls. She waited up until—he looks at the clock—four in the morning, but she never called to check up on him.
Something wiggles in the vicinity of his heart. Like the jolt you get when someone startles you, only instead of fading away, it seems to spread through his body, warming him from head to toe.
Taking care to be quiet, he goes into her—their—bedroom, pulls down the covers on the bed and changes into something reasonably clean that he can sleep in. Then he goes back into the other room, turns off the light and scoops her up in his arms. She mutters something incomprehensible and curls into his embrace. He feels the wiggle in his chest again. Something Jack said earlier comes back to him, and as he gently places her in bed and covers them both up he's overcome by a fierce need, an intensity of necessity that frightens him a little. He pulls her up against him.
"I love you, sweetheart. More than anyone I've ever known. I just...I love you. I need you to know that," he whispers, kissing the top of her head.
Her voice comes back, softly, sleepily. "I know. I love you, too."